25/11/2011

16/11/2011

My friend Nicholas Cooke and I (Laurie Rowan) have begun our own comedy night in Brighton. I’ll be playing the part of Chapsom Bear, the resident compere and theatrically trained grizzly bear. We’ve build a suit and everything. God I hope people don’t find that too wanky to laugh at, the more used to the idea the more cynical I become.

It’ll be good. A lot of groundwork has gone into it, we’ve designed the flyers all nice (see below), picked a great venue with just the right level of faded glamour to it and constructed an elaborate bear costume for Chapsom. We’ve also got my friend, the wonderful Ed Briggs providing musical accompaniment on the piano between acts. It’s all very novel.

That’s not even mentioning the acts we’ve got to come and perform, each one is genuinely exciting to have involved, we’ve got Naz Osmanoglu, Kieran Boyd, Keiron Nicholson, Will Ainsworth. Pete Armstrong and Viv Groskop. If you don’t know who they are, up your game.

Here’s the poster:

And here’s a little making of Chapsom’s head:

It’s got fur on it now and looks like the one in the poster, but I’m saving that for the night.

23/05/2010

Here’s a stream-of-consciousness story I wrote a while back:

It was a summer’s afternoon when Jason Smendelflank decided uncharacteristically to leave the house for a stroll. Uncharacteristic mainly due to the town’s mistaken belief that Jason had been dead for the past 15 years. He wasn’t dead that’s not where this is going, but he wasn’t a long way off in his current state of health. Not that he was terminal but he’d just not been looking after himself was all.

15 years previous Jason had ventured up to the loft to have a dig around and find what he could find, and there was plenty to be found. It was a full loft, full of curiosity and clutter and Jason’s imagination ran rampant for some time, a few hours, 5 hours 13 minutes if we’re to be exact, and we shall, there’ll be no complacency in this tale. There were boxes of old Mad magazines, lampshades mascaraing as ships, bottled ships with the ship removed, old cassette tapes, teddy bears, jam jars, hair nets, a big Barbie head where you could brush the hair if you so wished, and he did, loads of stuff, some of it more exotic and intriguing than the things I’ve just listed but I’m employing artistic licence here, you can fill in the blanks yourself it’ll make for a better story.